The Sheltering Sky

Heat and dust are such ubiquitous tropes in colonial and postcolonial works that an entire novel, by Ruth Prawar Jhabvala, bears Heat and Dust as its title. Heat is employed to illustrate the torpor and laziness exhibited by the natives—”without the energy to wave away the flies that crawled over their faces” (5)—as well as to explain the atypical (often irrational) behavior of the Westerners when they visit these colonized places in the warmer regions of the world: As Port explains to Tunner regarding Kit, “[t]he heat gets her down” (10). It also serves as a trope to mark the difference, the inexplicableness of the far-away, foreign place: “When the sun came through its heat was unexpectedly powerful” (64) and “it was no longer the sun alone that persecuted from above—the entire sky was like a metal dome grown white with heat” (288). The personification of heat as a cruel tormentor serves, by extension, to implicate the weather and the landscape itself in the suffering of the Western interlopers. It often also reflects the Westerner’s moods: The last quotation above is taken from the section in which Kit is subject to the daily raping by her native captors.